Carl Oppedahl practices trademark and patent law from beautiful offices perched in the Rockies, and from that vantage point, he monitors the online infrastructure of the PTO. He maintains a listserv concerned with the Madrid Protocol (subscribe here) and posted the following, presenting interesting statistics on ETEAS, paper filings and Madrid (reprinted with permission):
“Today a client of our firm asked me “How long does it take for my USPTO applications to show up in TESS?” I did some searching to see how long it takes these days.
Used to be it averaged two weeks for an e-filed case and almost three weeks for a paper-filed case to turn up in TESS. Back in those days, a case would turn up in TARR several days before it would turn up in TESS. So a persistent searcher who wished to try very hard to learn about the most recently filed cases would do so by searching TARR, not TESS (plugging in successive serial numbers until the most recent case had been found).
Summary: These days it seems to average just under a week for an e-filed case to get into TESS. And TARR and TESS match, in the sense that anything that is in TARR is also in TESS; there is not a delay with things turning up in TARR first and then only later in TESS.
Paper-filed cases take about a week and a half to get into TESS and TARR.
Madrid cases get into TESS and TARR essentially instantly, meaning they get into TESS and TARR the same day that WIPO communicates them to USPTO.
Details: Here are some actual search results carried out today (the 25th, a Sunday). I looked for e-filed US trademark applications (1(a) and 1(b)). I looked for paper-filed US trademark applications (1(a) and 1(b)). And I looked for Madrid Protocol applications (66(a)). In each case my goal was to find the most recently filed case. I defined this as the highest-numbered serial number in each series (77, 76, and 79 respectively).
The most recent records to enter TESS and TARR were Madrid Protocol records. The highest-numbered “79” case (Madrid Protocol) was 79034226. This is a case which WIPO communicated to USPTO on February 22, 2007 (this past Thursday). Its US filing date was January 8, 2007, meaning that the time between January 8, 2007 and February 22, 2007 were spent at the Office of Origin (in this case, Sweden) and at the International Bureau. USPTO loaded this case into the USPTO databases on the same day that WIPO communicated it to USPTO.
The next previous day on which Madrid applications got communicated to USPTO was February 15, 2007, exactly a week earlier. I did not pursue this further, but the impression I get is that may be WIPO communicates Madrid cases to USPTO once a week, on Thursdays. If so, then sometimes (as today) the most recent records entered into TESS and TARR are Madrid records, but on other days of the week it might happen that the most recent records entered would be e-filed 1(a) and 1(b) cases.
The second most recent category of cases loaded into TESS and TARR (as of today) were the e-filed cases. The most recently e-filed case to be entered into TESS and TARR was a case that was e-filed at 23:58:34 EST, about a minute and a half before midnight Eastern Time on February 20, 2007 (this past Tuesday). This was application number 77112022.
The remaining category is, of course, the paper-filed cases. The most recently filed paper application to turn up in TESS and TARR was application number 76672824, filed February 16, 2007. So it took about a week and a half for that case to find its way into TESS and TARR.
What fraction of these cases were paper-filed, e-filed, or Madrid?
Of the 1(a) and 1(b) cases (US origin cases) that were filed February 16, 2007, the answer is that just over 95 percent were e-filed and just under 5 percent were paper-filed. This was on a day that there were 1182 US-origin cases filed. On that day, of the 1182 cases filed, 52 were paper-filed and 1130 were e-filed.
At around the same time, a weekly data load from WIPO amounted to 215 cases. This suggests that the workload of the USPTO trademark law offices is lately averaging maybe ten percent Madrid work and maybe ninety percent non-Madrid work.”